Tupelo Impressions, After the Fall

I have missed two entire months. For the record, I fell off a ladder onto my studio floor on Aug. 30. Six broken ribs, separated shoulder, fractured skull, and concussion. Life can change in an instant.

Much recovered by now except a residual paralyzed facial nerve that keeps my left eye from blinking. It is taped shut and my vision is compromised. This is the same eye that had the detached retina surgeries 2 years ago. Then, I was excited by new ways of seeing. I started this Mental Seeds blog as an outlet to communicate with new ideas and try new techniques. Now I need to push even further.

I need to rebel against the blur. I stumble around trying to see the nuances and there are none. Go flat, no depth or dimension. Impressions are all I can do. Push Photoshop beyond what I thought I would ever do. Go bold.

There is a new filter in PhotoShop CS6 called Oil Paint. Lots of controls and permutations.

What I have not figured out is how to scale the effect I like. Depending on the file size of the photo, the filter (all art filters) have different effects. The strongest effect is when the file is small, no doubt because there are fewer pixels to push around.

In the first photo, of my rake resting in a pile of Tupelo leaves, the working file was 1000 pixels wide. The surreal leaves seem liquified.

This next is 2000 pixels. All the settings on the filter remain the same; but the effect is diminished.

And this one is 5600 pixels, the native raw file size, a size to make a nice print.

All three are interesting treatments, but the oil paint filter is not strong enough to radically alter the large file to match the first image. More work. More to learn. If I want to make a large print I need to figure this out, but blog size it looks great…..

Addendum:

To show the filter affect on the 5600 pixel image, I have sliced out a 600 pixel segment, from the top of the tree trunk. (I use 600 pixels wide because that is 100% of the viewing size on this blog.)

The filter effect is much more obvious when viewed here at full size, but still not nearly the same affect when the same filter is applied onto the smaller file-size image.

Just for grins here is a 600 pixel crop out of that smaller file-size photo: